574: Swine Flu

Title text: Bad flu epidemics can hit young adults hardest because they provoke their powerful immune systems into overreaction, so to stay healthy spend the next few weeks drunk and sleep-deprived to keep yours suppressed.

Swine flu is a strain of the flu which can be transmitted from pigs to humans. In 2009, it was the origin of the Pandemic H1N1/09 virus, which most news stations called either "H1N1" (the subtype name) or "swine flu". Because of the ambiguous name given to it and the somewhat hazy description of the transmittal process and dangers to humans, many people were concerned about the virus in ways that weren't going to be threats. This comic pokes a bit of fun at the overreaction by users on Twitter.

Randall (or someone else) seems to have created Twitter accounts for all referenced handles (that may not have already existed). Some of the handles continue their interactions with each other in later tweets.

Skeeve37 is a self-described hypochondriac. The tweet exemplifies the general populace's over-concern with the "animal themed" pandemics. Similarly after the bird flu scare, people avoided eating chicken.

Hanneloreec is a self-described "young lady who is concerned about many things". She is a reoccurring character in the webcomic Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques, who also manages her twitter handle.

Paulyshorefan's tweet is a reference to the flash game "Pandemic 2", in which players try to create a disease that infects the whole world. Madagascar is the most difficult country to infect, as it only has 1 port and often closes it at the slightest hint of an infection. The difficulty of infecting Madagascar has caused it to become a meme. The user's Twitter handle is a reference to Pauly Shore, a comedian who was briefly popular in the 1990s before quickly becoming out of favor and derided as unfunny.

CrackMonkey74's tweet is a parody of viral Christian(?) messages that say that current tragedies are God's punishment, despite the fact that the Bible says that the end is not yet to come. More specifically, Crackmonkey74 blames the ACLU, lesbians (a reference to the current culture wars that give big press towards proponents of same-sex marriage against fundamentalist Christians), 9/11 (the day when the Twin Towers fell, causing controversy on whether Muslim terrorists crashed their planes on the towers or whether the government staged this by purposefully demolishing the towers) and nanobots (possibly a reference towards the highly promising but still relatively not understood field of nanotechnology, plus another reference towards the phrase "playing God").

Twilight7531's tweet implies that she got a bone fracture which ended up protruding from her arm. However, she seems to lack medical knowledge (or intelligence in general, given that her name carries both something that may be a reference toward the infamous Twilight books and a "gimmicky" naming scheme (7531 has the numerals of every odd number that is less than 9)), so she is worried that her fracture is actually swine flu (though how she can be typing with a broken arm is confusing).

Wigu's tweet is a reply towards Untoward's. Given the context, Untoward seems to have "gotten intimate" with a pig (since syphilis is a venereal disease). Given the fact that Untoward got sick because of a pig, Untoward seems to have concluded that he got swine flu.

The last comment by 2011Seniorsrule references a medical paper published by the journal The Lancet, in which it is proposed that autism is caused by vaccination. Since then, the paper was partially retracted in 2004, and fully retracted in 2010 because of conflicts of interest. The entire incident has been defined as the MMR vaccine controversy. This stance has still been seen since the retraction of the paper, and still holds some popularity. The most famous figure in support of it is Jenny McCarthy. This Twitter user is not only using a debunked study about a completely different set of vaccines, they have also confused cause and effect (i.e. even if vaccines caused autism, that doesn't mean that autistic people carry flu vaccines). Also, licking vaccinated people isn't how vaccines are administered. On top of that, fear of germs is common among autistic people, so "licking an autistic kid" may be a difficult and possibly painful experience for the lickee.

The title text refers to the common notion that young adults are hard-drinking individuals who get little sleep.

[The comic shows a twitter search results page with "Swine flu" in the search box and a gray search button.]

twitter [Swine flu] (search)

[The results is displayed in a frame below the search panel:]

Realtime results for Swine flu 0.05

[This next line is highlighted in yellow. Most text here and below is written in normal black font, but the underlined links in the main text is in blue. Below each tweet is a line with info and reply links etc. all in gray font. Between the yellow line and the first tweet and between each tweet is a dotted line.]

Discussion

HANNELOREEC [1] is a character in the web comic Questionable Content [2]. Hannelore suffers from OCD and other issues including another anxiety disorder, and even the idea of kissing grosses her out. Her comment in this comic is a typical display of her OCD. -- ‎64.242.52.33 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I do not wish to start an edit war, so I shall give my reasoning here for putting this under "furries."
According to xkcd, furries are people with a fetish for animals. Given that Untoward seems to have "gotten intimate" with a pig (hence why he got a venereal disease), I decided that Untoward has an animal fetish, thus concluded that Untoward was a furry.
Greyson (talk) 22:41, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that all the twitter names are references to other online comics. 69.121.10.82 04:53, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Besides that, such an act does not make one a furry. Instead, it makes one a moron. Furries are in fact simply those who have an interest in anthropomorphic animals. 108.8.100.183 09:08, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I think the title text explanation misses a key point, some flu strains (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic) disproportionately impact fit healthy young people due to an overreaction of the immune system. The title text humorously suggests that counter-intuitively being drunk and sleep-deprived will actually be good for your health in such circumstances. Plm-qaz snr (talk) 14:05, 8 July 2014 (UTC)